The cicadas are singing again.
When she reaches the edge of the clearing, she looks back just once, and there’s the girl’s face peering out through a part in the calico curtain. She looks frightened; she waves at Dancy, and Dancy waves back.
I’m never gonna see you again, and I kinda wish that wasn’t true.
She walks back into the short stretch of forest dividing the clearing from the road. The going seems a little more difficult than when Jezzie was dragging her along, pell-mell, and once she gets turned around in a kudzu patch, has to retrace her steps, and find a clearer path. She’s drenched in sweat by the time she reaches the gravel shoulder of the highway, and she opens the jug and takes a long swallow. Then she looks again at the blue, blue sky, all the morning’s thunderheads come and gone. There’s no sign of the dragon, so maybe the girl in the crate was right, and maybe it’s flown away back through a hole in time to a world of serpent haunted seas, before Adam and Eve were driven out and cherubim with flaming swords were placed at the gates of Eden that no man or woman would ever again get in. Maybe that’s how it is.
And maybe that girl named after a whore and an idolater is right about all of it, and maybe you don’t know nothin’ about how things really are.
Dancy pushes the thought away, because self doubt’s as dangerous as books that say people evolved from monkeys and slime. Self doubt’s a distraction that can get her killed. She spares one more glance at the summer sky, and then she starts walking again, following the white center line, which will just have to do as a road map until the angel decides to speak to her again.
CALVED
Sam J. Miller
SAM J. MILLER (www.samjmiller.com) is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and The Minnesota Review, among others. He work has been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and lives in New York City. His debut novel The Art of Starving is forthcoming from HarperCollins. His story “Ghosts of Home” appears elsewhere in this book.
MY SON’S EYES were broken. Emptied out. Frozen over. None of the joy or gladness were there. None of the tears. Normally I’d return from a job and his face would split down the middle with happiness, seeing me for the first time in three months. Now it stayed flat as ice. His eyes leapt away the instant they met mine. His shoulders were broader and his arms more sturdy, and lone hairs now stood on his upper lip, but his eyes were all I saw.
“Thede,” I said, grabbing him.
He let himself be hugged. His arms hung limply at his sides. My lungs could not fill. My chest tightened from the force of all the never-let-me-go bear hugs he had given me over the course of the past fifteen years, and would never give again.
“You know how he gets when you’re away,” his mother had said, on the phone, the night before, preparing me. “He’s a teenager now. Hating your parents is a normal part of it.”
I hadn’t listened, then. My hands and thighs still ached from months of straddling an ice saw; my hearing was worse with every trip; a slip had cost me five days work and five days pay and five days’ worth of infirmary bills; I had returned to a sweat-smelling bunk in an illegal room I shared with seven other iceboat workers – and none of it mattered because in the morning I would see my son.
“Hey,” he murmured emotionlessly. “Dad.”
I stepped back, turned away until the red ebbed out of my face. Spring had come and the city had lowered its photoshade. It felt good, even in the cold wind.
“You guys have fun,” Lajla said, pressing money discretely into my palm. I watched her go with a rising sense of panic. Bring back my son, I wanted to shout, the one who loves me. Where is he. What have you done with him. Who is this surly creature. Below us, through the ubiquitous steel grid that held up Qaanaaq’s two million lives, black Greenland water sloshed against the locks of our floating city.
Breathe, Dom, I told myself, and eventually I could. You knew this was coming. You knew one day he would cease to be a kid.
“How’s school?” I asked.
Thede shrugged. “Fine.”
“Math still your favorite subject?”
“Math was never my favorite subject.”
I was pretty sure that it had been, but I didn’t want to argue.
“What’s your favorite subject?”
Another shrug. We had met at the sea lion rookery, but I could see at once that Thede no longer cared about sea lions. He stalked through the crowd with me, his face a frozen mask of anger.
I couldn’t blame him for how easy he had it. So what if he didn’t live in the Brooklyn foster-care barracks, or work all day at the solar-cell plant school? He still had to live in a city that hated him for his dark skin and ice-grunt father.
“Your mom says you got into the Institute,” I said, unsure even of what that was. A management school, I imagined. A big deal for Thede. But he only nodded.
At the fry stand, Thede grimaced at my clunky Swedish. The counter girl shifted to a flawless English, but I would not be cheated of the little bit of the language that I knew. “French fries and coffee for me and my son,” I said, or thought I did, because she looked confused and then Thede muttered something and she nodded and went away.
And then I knew why it hurt so much, the look on his face. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a kid anymore. I could handle him growing up. What hurt was how he looked at me: like the rest of them look at me, these Swedes and grid city natives for whom I would forever be a stupid New York refugee, even if I did get out five years before the Fall.
Gulls fought over food thrown to the lions. “How’s your mom?”
“She’s good. Full manager now. We’re moving to Arm Three, next year.”
His mother and I hadn’t been meant to be. She was born here, her parents Black Canadians employed by one of the big Swedish construction firms that built Qaanaaq back when the Greenland Melt began to open up the interior for resource extraction and grid cities starting sprouting all along the coast. They’d kept her in public school, saying it would be good for a future manager to be able to relate to the immigrants and workers she’d one day command, and they were right. She even fell for one of them, a fresh-off-the-boat North American taking tech classes, but wised up pretty soon after she saw how hard it was to raise a kid on an ice worker’s pay. I had never been mad at her. Lajla was right to leave me, right to focus on her job. Right to build the life for Thede I couldn’t.
“Why don’t you learn Swedish?” he asked a French fry, unable to look at me.
“I’m trying,” I said. “I need to take a class. But they cost money, and anyway I don’t have –”
“Don’t have time. I know. Han’s father says people make time for the things that are important for them.” Here his eyes did meet mine, and held, sparkling with anger and abandonment.
“Han one of your friends?”
Thede nodded, eyes escaping.
Han’s father would be Chinese, and not one of the laborers who helped build this city – all of them went home to hardship-job rewards. He’d be an engineer or manager for one of the extraction firms. He would live in a nice house and work in an office. He would be able to make choices about how he spent his time.